By Michaela Cavallaro & Bridget M. Burns
From our August 2024 & August 2022 issues
Burn, by Peter Heller
$28, hardcover, Knopf
When childhood friends Storey and Jess emerge from the northern Maine woods after their annual moose-hunting trip, they find devastation all around: entire towns burned to the ground, bridges blown up, and not a soul in sight save a few blackened bodies. Cellular reception is nonexistent, their SUV is out of gas, and they’re fresh out of supplies, leaving the men to pilfer from abandoned stores and boats as they attempt to make their way home — Storey to his wife and daughters in Vermont and Jess to an uncertain future in Colorado, where he has recently experienced a pair of devastating losses.
Before the two retreated into the woods, there had been paroxysms of violence in Maine, which was beset by a wave of secessionist fervor. As they trek across rutted dirt roads between fictional towns, it slowly dawns on them what a simmering partisan conflict has wrought. Despite — or perhaps because of — their dire circumstances, Jess is moved to reassess his life, lamenting a failed marriage and revisiting boyhood experiences with Storey’s family that have shadowed their friendship.
With its vision of a near-future dystopia that, alas, doesn’t feel wholly unimaginable in today’s political climate, Burn isn’t an easy read. But neither is it as grim as its opening pages might indicate, thanks, in part, to a surprising encounter midway through the novel that injects a hint of optimism. Though female characters are sketched rather thinly and the setting’s relationship to local geography is loose at best (we’ve never found a central Maine town gussied up to resemble a seaside fishing village), these blemishes are eclipsed by Heller’s sparkling, evocative descriptions of the natural world — the horrors inflicted upon it by humans and the beauty that remains.
Fire Exit, by Morgan Talty
$28.95, hardcover, Tin House
Generational trauma isn’t a phrase Charles Lamosway would use — the narrator of Talty’s debut novel, the follow-up to his standout short-story collection, Night of the Living Rez, is a plainspoken man. But he spends hours smoking cigarettes on his front porch, wistfully watching Elizabeth, who has no idea he is her biological father, at her parents’ home across the river, on the Penobscot Nation’s Indian Island Reservation. Charles, who is white, grew up on the reservation with his mother, Louise, and his stepfather, a Penobscot man named Fredrick who treated Charles as his own. When Charles’s girlfriend, who is part Penobscot, became pregnant, he went along with her plan to marry an indigenous man who would claim the child was his, so she could be an enrolled member of the tribe. But as Elizabeth reaches her mid-20s, Charles feels a pull to share the truth.
At the same time, Louise is slipping deeper into dementia after a lifetime of battling severe depression. Often unsure who Charles is, she is at turns indifferent and hostile as she revisits her past in his presence, including the question of who is to blame for Fredrick’s death. That topic nags at Charles too, as he struggles to balance caring for Louise with his concern for Elizabeth, whom he hasn’t seen in weeks, and his loyal, hard-drinking friend, Bobby.
Closely observed and carefully plotted, with welcome moments of wry humor, Fire Exit explores the ways in which Charles and those around him hurt one another, even as they long to form enduring connections. In sentences as crisp as the Penobscot River, Talty, a Penobscot Nation citizen, asks readers to ponder the obligations between parents and children, the meaning of belonging, and the legacy of the blood that runs through our veins.
The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan
$29, hardcover, Knopf
Jane Flanagan returns to her hometown, the fictional Awadapquit, in York County, in disgrace. She has tanked her marriage and her job as a Harvard archivist by getting blackout drunk at a work event and publicly canoodling with an assistant. Now, she’s holed up in her alcoholic late-mother’s cluttered house, wrestling with ghosts both figurative and, presumably, literal after her high-school best friend buys her a session with a psychic named Clementine.
The story spirals back in time as Jane mourns her career and her relationship with David, her mild-mannered economics-professor husband. Looming in the background is her longtime fascination with a formerly abandoned Victorian-era home on the cliffs overlooking the town’s harbor, where, as a teenager, Jane sought refuge from her volatile mother. Her fixation on the place deepens when Genevieve, a wealthy Bostonite who has renovated the home beyond all recognition and believes it to be haunted, hires Jane to look into its history.
The narrative follows Jane’s research to the house’s previous owner, who shares long-hidden secrets that undermine Jane’s understanding of her own family; to Clementine’s summer residence at a spiritualist camp modeled after the real Camp Etna, where Jane and Genevieve seek out information about the home’s supposed ghosts; to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, where one of the house’s former residents grew up; to the Penobscot people, whose ancestors had violent encounters with the Victorian’s original owner, Captain Samuel Littleton, and his cronies. The tale is stuffed to the brim, but The Cliffs is nonetheless an immersive page-turner about the ways actions and their consequences reverberate across generations.
The Midcoast, by Adam White
$26, hardcover, Hogarth Books
Home for the summer from his chichi boarding school, Damariscotta native Andrew is dismayed to find his dad has secured him a job at the (fictional) Thatch Lobster Pound. The work is grueling, and his boss, Ed, just two years his senior, never misses a chance to chide Andrew about his comparatively cushy upbringing. Andrew can’t wait to escape Maine; Ed is quite content to live and work on the midcoast, as have generations of Thatches before him. Even before Andrew quits, there’s no love lost between the two.
Years later, Andrew returns to Maine with his wife, two kids in tow, and is surprised to find that the Thatches have become the town’s wealthiest and most influential family. Ed is now hobnobbing with those he once described to Andrew, dismissively, as “your kind of people,” while Andrew has traded his dreams of screenwriting for work as an English teacher. But the murky details of how the Thatch family came into wealth are the subject of much local gossip.
Andrew’s growing obsession with the Thatches reveals an empire of illicit dealings — and a rickety one, at that. The Midcoast is ostensibly a crime drama, but at heart, it’s a study in archetypes, starring two men from the same hometown but very different backgrounds: blue collar and white collar, lobstering and lacrosse. White, who grew up in Damariscotta and once pulled shifts at the South Bristol Fishermen’s Co-op, asks readers to consider what defines success: Material wealth? Education and achievement? The ability to provide for one’s family — through whatever means necessary? The novel offers no easy answers, just a gripping story weighing the monotony of a life lived safely against the risks and rewards of a less scrupulous path.
The Disinvited Guest, by Carol Goodman
$29, hardcover, William Morrow
In this gothic, pandemic-era page-turner, 10 years have passed since COVID, and the world is dealing with the spread of yet another new virus. The characters in Goodman’s novel all float their own theories as to why: society learned nothing from its past mistakes, the government bungled its readiness and response, or maybe, as the most conspiratorial theorize, the government itself is responsible.
In this anxious atmosphere, seven acquaintances head to a private island off the down east coast, planning to quarantine together all summer — maybe longer. Reed Harper, the island’s owner, inherited the summer-cottage estate from his parents after they died from (what else?) COVID. Along comes his wife, Lucy, the story’s increasingly unhinged protagonist, plus Reed’s sister and partner, a pair of married friends, and caretaker and native Mainer Mac, whose late mother once worked for the Harpers.
Spruce stands and granite ledges — and Mac’s down east accent — ground the story in Maine, but the island is clearly otherworldly. There are mysterious Gaelic scrawlings, a bog that seems more quicksand than wetland, and passed-down tales of mermaids, selkies, and witches. Fever Island (yep) got its name when it served as a 19th-century quarantine stop for ships carrying Irish immigrants. Unfortunately, typhus got the better of most of them, so the island is full of graves — and maybe, ghosts.
The Disinvited Guest is part mystery and part horror, but behind all the genre conventions is a poignant exploration about everything the pandemic has put at risk of loss: lives, relationships, and feelings of trust, safety, and normalcy. It’s a cinematic supernatural escape, sure, but it’s also a recognizable portrayal of the stresses plenty of us are feeling in the very real post-pandemic world.
Vacationland, by Meg Mitchell Moore
$28, hardcover, William Morrow
Louisa and Kristie have both escaped to Owls Head for the summer. Louisa is leaving her comfortable home (and rocky marriage) back in Brooklyn for a few months at her parents’ lovely summer cottage, three kids in tow, hoping to finish the book she’s taken a year-long sabbatical to write, as well as to spend time with her ailing father. Kristie, meanwhile, rode the bus from her humbler digs in Pennsylvania, searching for a piece of her past, with only a letter from her late mother to guide her.
That’s the setup for a braided tale that comes together in ways that are fun and interesting, if not entirely surprising. Moore intricately weaves Louisa and Kristie’s stories, with chapters that alternate not only their points of view, but also those of other, ancillary characters, and the shifting perspectives allow us a variety of takes on a Maine summer, from that of a cash-strapped restaurant server to a privileged child enthralled with marine life to a lifelong summer person old enough to realize her idyllic summer getaway has secrets of its own.
Of course, there’s a twist, and though you may see it coming, the most engaging parts of the book come after. When Vacationland is at its best, it’s a wistful meditation on class, its characters weighing the value of family versus the value of money as they go about their traditional summer visits to familiar-to-Mainers sites like the Farnsworth Art Museum, Owls Head Light, and Wasses Hot Dogs. A surprising number of scenes unfold at Renys, in fact, Moore’s characters bringing us along for the twists and turns of this beachy “Maine adventure.”
